There was this one time I saved a mouse. Jose Gonzalez reminded me of that.

It was long ago, moons ago. I used to stash my pets in the caravan next door. But it was winter, and it was Scotland, so it was very, very cold. And the caravan wrapped its hard chassis in icicles, and one of my baby mice kind of got frozen, and the man from the Animal Welfare came, and he shook his head, and he whispered: ‘dead.’

But I thought of a story my grandmother told me: about scotch, and the restorative powers thereof. So I administered said liquor, softly on a cotton-bud, into the mouse’s tiny mouth.

Two things happened simultaneously. The mouse twitched sharply into life; and a breath-taking song started playing on the radio. The song was “Hand on Your Heart” by Kylie Minogue, and it sounded something like a miracle.

It had it all: Casio karate rhythms, roller-disco double vocals—synth pop like a jolt of pure hope; disco drumbeats like a lifeline.

The mouse remained lively for moons to come. But the real phenomenon, it transpires, is the recent act of resurrection that an ace Argentinean Swede has performed on the song that sound-tracked my tiny rodent’s mighty comeback.

Jose Gonzalez’s swoon-inducing, exquisite interpretation of “Hand on Your Heart”—as first evinced on a split single with countryman and charming fellow arch-bard Jens Lekman—is a gentle, melancholic marvel.

Gonzales re-writes Stock Aitken and Waterman’s teenage bike-shed attitude as the sweetest of treatises on denial and desolation; he re-casts the song’s legwarmer-saddled, sassy protagonist as a washed-up, worn-out, love-lorn wonder.

His temperate guitar patterns tumble like tears; his words crackle like the fire in his heart. “I want to hear you tell me you don’t want my love,” he fruitlessly bids to assert.

On this, (and on his debut, Veneer), Gonzalez circumscribes the fragility of life at the hands of man: like the beat of the heart of a mouse in my palm.

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